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This is a racist decision that takes us back to an era of state’s rights. This decision cannot stand.

Yeah. The 10th Amendment can’t be allowed to stand. It must be struck, and never mind that Article V bit; that’s just in the way.

Oh, and never mind that the outcome of the Supremes’ ruling was to uphold a decision by the citizens of Michigan to codify in their constitution the concept that race (or gender, ethnicity, or national origin) cannot be used as a criterion for selection for admission to college.

…not of the Supreme Court. I writing now about the Court’s ruling in the Michigan affirmative action case (Schuette v BAMN) concerning the state’s “decision to end affirmative action at its public universities.”

The Court ruled 6-2 to uphold Michigan’s decision, holding essentially, that such a choice should be left to the States’ citizenry and not determined by the court system.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Court (mostly—there were a number of separate concurring opinions), expanded on that:

This post—a long one, so heads up—borrows heavily from a premise I develop early in my book A Conservative’s Manifesto.

One theme that ran through the English colonies in North America, early on, was the view that some men are better than others, and those others are born to be led—they have no liberty, only those “freedoms” and “rights” handed down from on high by the government that rules over them. The common man is incapable of reason, is unable to decide what is best for himself, and must be led by his betters. Of course, this governance always is for only the best of reasons: “We know better,” and “It’s for your own good.” And it flowed, then, from a pater familias and kindly king.

The letter from DoJ to Pennsylvania’s Secretary of the Commonwealth can be viewed here. Not only is Obama objecting to protecting the sanctity of a legitimate vote by trying to block efforts at screening “voters” who are ineligible, in this letter he’s also demanding a potful of wholly irrelevant personally identifying information on voters and potential “voters.” Here’s a sample from his DoJ’s letter:

The current complete Pennsylvania voter registration list, including each registered voter’s full name, address, date of birth, identifying numbers (including driver license, social security, or other numbers), voter history, and race.

The atheists are at it again. The Daily Caller describes this situation in Warren, MI.

It seems that the city has allowed a Nativity scene to be displayed, as it has done for a number of years, in the City Hall lobby. This offends the Freedom From Religion Foundation and a local associate, complainant Douglas Marshall. Marshall wants to place his own sign next to the Nativity to balance the display.

The principles statement of our social compact acknowledges that all humans are endowed with certain inalienable, natural rights, and the entirety of our social compact seeks to apply those natural rights in a concrete way to the members of our compact, us American citizens. Our Declaration of Independence says of this:

…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed[.]

The Daily Callerreports on a series of meetings between our government and representatives from several Islamic governments that have pressed us for years to terminate our ability to speak freely about Islam’s history and obligations. We might think it’s entirely appropriate that we should engage those governments on the matter of religious and speech freedoms, the United States Constitution, and what must occur within our borders regarding our acknowledged inalienable rights.

It is the view of some that the primary task of our government is to engage in wealth redistribution so as to tend to equalize income—to equalize the results of individual effort, regardless of the level or quality of that effort. There are problems with this asserted purpose, though, historical, practical, and moral.

During the extended discussion of our nation’s blueprint, James Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 10, for instance [emphasis mine],

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.

Let’s look at the offers. The Democratic Party Senate hasn’t offered a budget in nearly three years. The last budget proposal proposed by President Obama, last winter, was laughed out of the Senate 97-0. Not even the do-nothing Democrats took it seriously.

On the other hand, the newly elected Republican House of Representatives, flush with modern Conservatives, passed a budget largely developed by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R, WI) in their first month in office. It’s lain dormant in that Democrat’s Senate, where the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid (D, NV), has steadfastly refused even to let it come to the floor for debate, much less be voted up or down—or a counter proposal made.

In 2008, JPMorgan Chase was forced by the Federal government to accept bailout funds from TARP, even though the bank had no need of these funds. The government’s reasoning for this was that they didn’t want to embarrass the banks that actually “needed” TARP bailout by having those banks be the only ones being funded by the government. In the end, some 700 banks received TARP funds, which sounds like a lot, until that number is compared to the total number of banks in the US: nearly 9500 having assets of at least $100 million. Yet, despite only 7% of the banks receiving bailout funds (and not all of them needing the funds), the entire banking industry is tarred by the failures of the few. Flowing from this is the view that all banks contributed to the Panic of 2008 by overextending themselves with foolish investments, even though only a few of them actually were so engaged.

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2 + 2 = 4
--Polish proverb

Be not intimidated... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
--John Adams

Nothing in the universe has a shorter half-life than a politician's memory for inconvenient facts.
--Admiral Hamish Alexander, RMN

Dawn is nature's way of telling you to go to bed.
And to just stay there until the evil yellow disk is gone again.
--Anonymous

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.
--Aristotle

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
--Chief Justice John Roberts.

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--Shane Mclean

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my ax.
--Abraham Lincoln

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Who is this Pogue?

I'm a USAF vet, a quasi-retired Systems Engineer, and writer. In my spare time, I turn exotic woods into piles of sawdust and kindling, out of which occasionally sticks a piece of furniture that doesn't look too bad from a distance, with my glasses off.
Oh, and I have a rather dyspeptic view of Big Government.

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eehines1473 -at- yahoo dot com

The image in the header is from NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity on its 11-year anniversary on the Red Planet. [I]t has used its Pancam (fancy name for its panoramic camera) to snap this wide view from atop "Cape Tribulation," a part of Endeavour Crater's rim that sits at a height of 440 feet. That's 80 percent of the height of the Washington Monument, NASA says.

The photo was taken on January 6 and released by NASA January 22, 2015.